This column was reported from Hebron and the Kalandia refugee camp, West Bank.

As Governor Christie toured Jerusalem one day last week, the brother of one of North Jersey’s leading Palestinian activists walked the dusty alleys of the Kalandia refugee camp eight miles away and wondered about a basic staple of life.

Would he have running water?

No — not on this day.

The dry faucets in his home and office inside the camp were hardly a surprise to Zuhair Assaf, whose brother, Aref Assaf, is the president and founder of the North Jersey-based American-Arab Forum.

“This happens all the time,” he said as his 6-year-old daughter, Shahd, stood nearby and a stray cat snuggled around his ankles. “This is our life here.”

That same day, in the ancient biblical city of Hebron, some 30 miles to the south across the rolling Judean hills, David Wilder, who grew up in Closter and graduated from Northern Valley Regional High School in Demarest, worried about another of life’s staples — housing.

Israeli police had just evicted some of his fellow Jewish settlers from what had been a Palestinian-owned apartment building a few hundred yards from the Cave of Machpelah, where Abraham and other biblical forefathers and matriarchs are said to be buried.

Wilder, 58, a spokesman for the settlers, said they had a spiritual and legal right to move into the apartments. The Israeli government said they broke the law.

“God gave us this land,” said Wilder, who has seven children and 17 grandchildren. “We will be back.”

Overseas trips by American politicians inevitably come down to choices — what stops to make and what people to meet. In Israel, where even selecting a taxi driver or a hotel can touch political nerve endings, those choices can be politically perilous.

For his first overseas trip as governor — and his first to the Middle East in any capacity — Christie stuck to a tried-and-true road map. Each day, the governor traveled on a tour bus or van to meetings with political, education and business leaders or to Jewish and Christian holy sites. He flew to Jordan on Thursday to meet King Abdullah II and is scheduled to return to New Jersey on Sunday.

The busy itinerary also was notable for what it did not include — in particular, no visits with Jewish settlers from New Jersey on the West Bank or with Palestinians who have similar connections to the Garden State.

180-degree separation

In Kalandia and Hebron, Christie would have found plenty of Jersey links, along with a firsthand view of why divisions between Palestinians and Israelis are so deep. Many West Bank communities, for example, are supported by synagogues and other institutions in New Jersey. A Teaneck synagogue raised funds to purchase an armor-plated bus to transport visitors to Wilder’s Hebron community.

Christie said he wanted to focus attention on forging his Israeli political and business ties.

“I came here to see and experience Israel,” he said on his first day, when asked whether he would make a stop in a Palestinian community.

Back in New Jersey last week, Aref Assaf called on the governor to stop at Kalandia. Assaf did not get a response.

“Without visiting the Palestinian side, he will come back with an incomplete picture,” said Assaf, who was born in the Kalandia camp 53 years ago. “If you are going to fly over the West Bank to visit Jordan, why not just stop and visit my family in Kalandia?”

In Hebron, David Wilder did not formally invite the governor. But he said Christie would have benefited from a visit.

“Until he sees how we live, Christie won’t understand the true nature of Israel,” Wilder said.

What Christie would have seen is a community that’s been described as one of the more extremist of the dozens of Jewish settlements that dot the West Bank — communities that provoke intense debate in Israel and elsewhere over the nature of the West Bank occupation.

The question of who controls Hebron, one of the oldest cities on the West Bank, has become one of the most hotly debated issues in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

Jewish settlers don’t see themselves as visitors to Hebron. They claim the steep, rocky landscape as part of their ancient biblical birthright — a covenant that has roots with Abraham. A sign near the Jewish community center proclaims that Jewish settlers have returned to homes stolen from Jews in the 1920s by Palestinians.

Palestinians consider Hebron a key city in what they hope one day will be an independent state. They view Jewish settlers as the equivalent of foreign invaders stealing land where they have nurtured grape orchards and sheep herds for centuries.

Today, Hebron’s Jewish community consists of 95 families and 350 yeshiva students — all guarded by an Israeli army battalion. Roughly 200,000 Palestinians also call the city home.

“If they hit us,” Wilder said of the Palestinians, “we’re not going to turn the other cheek.”

Walking Hebron’s streets, Wilder carries a semiautomatic pistol tucked into a holster on his belt. The walls of his home — and other homes and schools — are pockmarked with bullet holes from Palestinian snipers. His office wall bears the photos of several settlers who have been shot to death.

“They’re barbarians,” Wilder said of the Palestinians who live in the surrounding hills.

Earlier that same day in the Kalandia camp, Zuhair Assaf, 50, offered his own description of the Israelis: “Occupiers,” he said.

Such descriptions embody the widespread resentment and distrust that now frames the lives of 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians and the more than 500,000 Jewish settlers, according to Israeli census statistics.

In the last decade, more than 1,400 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks from the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, according to statistics compiled by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. During that same time, more than 5,500 Palestinians have been killed, mostly in clashes with Israeli soldiers on the West Bank and in Gaza, according to figures compiled by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group that monitors the West Bank.

In Kalandia, Zuhair Assaf’s 11-year-old brother was shot to death in the weeks after the Six Day War, when Israel’s military seized the West Bank in 1967. Assaf later spent seven years in an Israeli prison for leading violent protests against Israel.

After leaving jail, Assaf joined the Palestinian security service run by Yasser Arafat. Assaf, who now runs a building-supply business, still admires Arafat. He keeps a photo of himself with the Palestinian leader on his living room wall above a sofa.

“It is very difficult to live here,” Assaf said.

Assaf’s wife, Rehab, 43, pointed to the kitchen.

“No water,” she said.

She then pointed to two kerosene lanterns by the living room door.

“We need these when the electric stops.”

Little infrastructure

Whether the Israeli government was to blame for the day’s water cutoff was hard to tell.

The Israeli military controls the camp. But the school, health clinic and other services are monitored by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees. In a recent report, the U.N. said Kalandia’s water cutbacks and electrical shortages — only 60 percent of the homes have electrical power at any time — are linked to a simple equation: too many people and not enough resources.

The camp was established in 1949 as a tent colony for Palestinians who left their homes in Israel after the Jewish homeland was established a year earlier. Today, Kalandia’s 11,000 residents live on three-tenths of a square mile, just beyond the 20-foot walls of the Kalandia checkpoint separating the West Bank from Israel.

More than 60 percent of the residents of Kalandia — also referred to as Qalandia — are under 25 years old, the U.N. says, and unemployment was 25.9 percent in 2010, the most recent year for which statistics were compiled.

Besides unemployment, a U.N. website points out that “major problems” in Kalandia include an “insufficient sewer network” and “destroyed roads.”

“People here are always thinking they should find a better life somewhere else. But where?” said Wajih Attallah, a camp leader. “The Israelis have confiscated so much land.”

“There will come a day when the Palestinians will prove we have the right to the land,” Assaf said. “Then I will have a future.”

That afternoon, in Hebron, land confiscation took on a different meaning.

Around 1 p.m., as families elsewhere in the Jewish settlement cleaned their homes for Passover, several dozen Israeli border police officers suddenly surrounded a three-story apartment building where about 15 settlers had moved in the week before.

Wilder said the building, which is only a few hundred yards from the Machpelah cave, had been purchased legally from a Palestinian owner. But residents never got the necessary approval from the Israeli military to move in.

When police arrived, most of the adults were away at work. Only a few women and children remained.

As cops in riot helmets watched, a mother in a black jacket pushed a blue baby carriage and gazed straight ahead — her eyes not meeting those of the soldiers. On her right, her son carried a brown teddy bear. Behind her, a daughter, tears streaming down her face, pushed another carriage.

A few hours later, soldiers stopped a woman and a teenage boy from returning to the building.

“He stabbed us in the back,” Wilder said of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who approved the eviction. “We have the right to expand our community. He won’t let us.”

Netanyahu’s office said justice ministry officials were reviewing the building sale records to determine if they were legitimate.

“We are strengthening the Jewish community in Hebron, the City of the Patriarchs,” Netanyahu said in a statement. “But there is one principle that we uphold. We do everything according to the law, and we will continue to do so.”

In Kalandia that afternoon, Attallah’s 17-year-old daughter, Maram, walked down the main street. She was wearing a T-shirt inscribed with the drawing of a key to a house — a symbol that many Palestinians see as emblematic of the inherent unlawfulness that has gripped their lives since they were forced to give up their home to make way for a Jewish homeland in 1948.

“It’s the key of the right of return,” Maram Attallah said — a claim that includes the family’s former home in the hills to the west of Jerusalem.

She leaves her home each day at 6:30 a.m. to make sure she can pass through an Israeli checkpoint to attend school, and she wants to go to college.

“I dream of a master’s degree and becoming a movie director,” she said. “But we need to settle the problem with the Israelis before real change will come.”

In Hebron, Aryeh Davis, a 28-year-old teacher and father of two daughters and a son, harbors another sort of dream.

“The future will be that Jews will live in the land of Israel. It can take a short time or a long time,” he said as he watched Israeli soldiers guard the disputed apartment house. “We have a promise in the Bible that the land will be ours, and that’s that way it will be.”

And what of the Palestinians?

“They can choose to stay here, or they can go to the lands where they came from,” Davis said. “This land is the Jews’ land.”